The organization was founded in Caracas in 2011 as a brainchild of the Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. It groups 33 nations of Latin America and the Caribbean but excludes the United States and Canada. Many people see it as Chávez’s challenge to the Organization of American States, which is based in Washington and includes the United States and Canada among its members.

According to a report by Xinhua a Venezuelan plane has landed on the island of Djerba (Tunisia) to evacuate members of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s family, This was announced by Tunisian radio but from a rebel source in Benghazi..
The correspondent quotes the source as saying that Gaddafi’s family members would soon leave Tunisia for the Venezuelan capital Caracas, adding that “it was the beginning of the end of Gaddafi’s rule.” There was no explanation of how the Gadaffi’s [sic] would get to Tunisia..

It wouldn’t surprise anyone if Gaddafi/Kadhafi/Gadaffi (he of the multiple spellings) would like to get out of the insurgents’ way. However, for now, at least, he’s remaining defiant, and Hugo still hasn’t brought the gold into Venezuela (just in case there are sanctions, you know).

So, until you see Muammar landing in Caracas and running into Hugo’s open arms, don’t believe it.

Countries such as Iran and Libya, which have been subject to international sanctions, have in the past repatriated gold reserves, traders said. Libya’s foreign reserves were frozen after war broke out this year. “There is a growing preference among many different communities in the gold market to have their physical gold at home,” said Edel Tully, precious metals strategist at UBS.

We understand neither whom we are fighting for nor the consequences of invading a Muslim country. To apprehend these things requires a rudimentary grasp of sharia. You don’t need a doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence. As I contend in The Grand Jihad, the basics will more than suffice. The problem is that, since the World Trade Center was first bombed in 1993, the government has been telling us that Islam has nothing to do with the jihadist campaign against us, so we have studiously avoided informing ourselves about Islam and its law.
It has come to light in just the last few days that commanders of the “rebels” (you know, those secular freedom fighters who are supposedly better for us than Qaddafi) include one Abdul-Hakim al-Hasadi. And, I’ll be darned, it turns out that Hasadi is a jihadist who fought the United States in Afghanistan, and was detained for years until our forces turned him over to Libya. That was during the Bush years, when, through democracy-project alchemy, Qaddafi was transformed into a valuable U.S. ally against terrorism. Our new friend Qaddafi promptly . . . released him in 2008, in a deal designed to appease his Islamist opposition — a common practice in the Middle East, where, because Islam dominates life, even dictators must alternately court and repress jihadists in order to hang on.

The president told lawmakers that NATO has begun proceedings against Qadhafi at the international court at The Hague, according to a GOP aide briefed on the call. He also said that the U.S. mission has always been humanitarian — to stop Qadhafi from slaughtering his own people — the aide said.

Do they expect Muammar to just step down?

And now for a deja vu moment: Remember when Reagan bombed Libya and Gaddafi posed with a dead baby, claiming Reagan had killed his daughter? There may be more of that coming up soon,

Apparently the first to report the baby news was Ukrainian daily Komsomolskaya Pravda v Ukraine, which says 38-year old Galina Kolotnitska is not saying who the father is, but she is pregnant and wants to return to Libya.

That’s not to say the president won’t talk about Libya over the next few days, aides say, but he’s not likely to succumb to pressure to deliver a long, explanatory address to outline his elusive endgame to the nation until the path ahead becomes clearer.

From the start, the administration insisted that it was acting to avert the imminent slaughter of civilians in Benghazi and other rebel-held cities, and that the goal of the military operations was clearly spelled out in the United Nations Security Council resolution.

Mr. Obama’s administration, however, has clearly tried to avoid the debate over a strategy beyond that by shifting the burden of enforcing the United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing force on to France, Britain and other allies, including Arab nations like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, which on Thursday said that it would contribute warplanes to the effort. In other words, the American exit strategy is not necessarily the coalition’s exit strategy.

“We didn’t want to get sucked into an operation with uncertainty at the end,” the senior administration official said. “In some ways, how it turns out is not on our shoulders.”

In any case, for Obama, military objectives take a back seat to diplomatic appearances. The president is obsessed with pretending that we are not running the operation — a dismaying expression of Obama’s view that his country is so tainted by its various sins that it lacks the moral legitimacy to … what? Save Third World people from massacre?

Obama seems equally obsessed with handing off the lead role. Hand off to whom? NATO? Quarrelling amid Turkish resistance (see above), NATO still can’t agree on taking over command of the airstrike campaign, which is what has kept the Libyan rebels alive.

This confusion is purely the result of Obama’s decision to get America into the war and then immediately relinquish American command. Never modest about himself, Obama is supremely modest about his country. America should be merely “one of the partners among many,” he said Monday. No primus inter pares for him. Even the Clinton administration spoke of America as the indispensable nation. And it remains so. Yet at a time when the world is hungry for America to lead — no one has anything near our capabilities, experience and resources — America is led by a man determined that it should not.

A man who dithers over parchment. Who starts a war from which he wants out right away. Good God. If you go to take Vienna, take Vienna. If you’re not prepared to do so, better then to stay home and do nothing.

Civilian planes will likely start failing out the sky, as did the one over Lockerbie; assassination attempts will multiply, like the attempted Libyan-backed murder of the Saudi king in 2003; al-Qaeda and affiliates might be aided and abetted to do Lord-knows-what to the Italians, the French, the British and, of course, to us. With nothing to lose, and way beyond the threshold of worrying about sanctions and such, Qaddafi could well become more dangerous than ever. If I were Silvio Berlusconi, in particular, I’d pick my future whorehouses with extreme care.

A ruler like Qaddafi is part Milosevic, part Saddam, part Noriega, and part Kim Jong Il. They stay in power for years through killing and more killing (to paraphrase Dirty Harry, “They like it”), and they do not leave, ever, unless the U.S. military either bombs them to smithereens or physically goes into their countries and yanks them out of their palaces. Period. They most certainly do not care much for the concern of the Arab League, the U.N., or a contingent from Europe, or a grand verbal televised threat from a U.S. president — again, even if his name is Barack Hussein Obama and he is not George Bush.

Sorry, but that is where we are and where we’ve always been, so we can either quit, as in Lebanon and Somalia; send in the Marines to take charge of postwar stabilization, as in Afghanistan and Iraq; target Qaddafi and bomb him incessantly until he is broken, as in Clinton’s Balkan air campaign; or schedule a multiyear, Iraq-style no-fly zone, with ample latitude to bomb now and then to carve out sanctuaries within Libya. Those are the options, and one will be chosen one way or another, even if the president thinks he can once again vote present on all of them.

In a briefing on board Air Force One Wednesday, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes took a crack at an answer. “I think what we are doing is enforcing a resolution that has a very clear set of goals, which is protecting the Libyan people, averting a humanitarian crisis, and setting up a no-fly zone,” Rhodes said. “Obviously that involves kinetic military action, particularly on the front end.”

Aims and Objectives: Fact: We are now and then bombing Libyan ground targets in order to enhance the chances of rebel success in removing or killing Qaddafi. Fiction: We are not offering ground support but only establishing a no-fly zone, and have no desire to force by military means Qaddafi to leave. Questions: Is our aim, then, a reformed Qaddafi? A permanently revolutionary landscape? A partitioned, bisected nation? What is the model? Afghanistan? Mogadishu? The 12-year no-fly-zone in Iraq? A Mubarak-like forced exile? Who are the rebels? Westernized reformers? Muslim Brotherhood types? A mix? Who knows? Who cares?

“The use of force is not our first choice, and is not a choice that I make lightly,” Obama said in a statement from Brazil where he is on a tour of Latin America. “But we cannot stand idly by when a tyrant tells his own people that there will be no mercy.”

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff went on Sunday interview shows today to echo the Obama administration’s position that the U.S. is working with allies on military action in Libya that is defined and limited — and could conceivably leave Moammar Gadhafi in power.
…
President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and other U.S. officials have called for an end to the Gadhafi government, but that is not the goal of the coalition mission.

Defending his decision to attack rebel cities, Gaddafi told Obama, “Al-Qaida is an armed organisation, passing through Algeria, Mauritania and Mali. What would you do if you found them controlling American cities with the power of weapons? What would you do, so I can follow your example.”

Congress was not broadly consulted on the decision to intervene in Libya, except in a Thursday afternoon classified briefing where administration officials explained the diplomatic and military plan. Rice was already deep in negotiations in New York.

Obama’s Tuesday night decision to push for armed intervention was not only a defining moment in his ever-evolving foreign policy, but also may have marked the end of the alliance between Clinton and Gates — an alliance that has successfully influenced administration foreign policy decisions dating back to the 2009 Afghanistan strategy review.

Here are just some of the fundamental questions the Administration has failed to answer as our military stands on the brink of a new and costly commitment:

So far, the only firm commitments are a naval blockade, AWACS for air traffic control, and signal-jamming aircraft. U.S. officials said that it would probably take several days for a full operation to be undertaken and that President Obama had not yet approved the use of U.S. military assets. Will he? Will the U.S. be using military force against Libya?
If establishing a no-fly zone in Libya is so vital to U.S. national security, why did the Administration waste a week getting approval from the U.N.?
Imposing a no-fly zone entails substantial costs for U.S. armed forces and risks diverting scarce U.S. military and intelligence assets. Will the vital missions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and the Horn of Africa suffer?
Are the rebels free of terrorist elements, and what precautions will we require them to take to ensure that weapons we supply are not sold or diverted to other groups?
Will we rule out supplying arms (“Stinger” anti-aircraft missiles, for example) that could pose a potent threat to U.S. forces if they end up in the hands of terrorists?

Obama’s in Brazil, taking a trip that should have been scheduled two years ago. I am glad he’s finally gone to Brazil.

His weekly address touched on the topic,

Obama should be creating a much more business-friendly environment for trade with Latin America, and instead of giving lip service, can easily approve the free trade agreements with Colombia and Peru, and possibly one with Brazil. That would increase America’s competitiveness within the hemisphere.